How the sources
get checked
Every report on this site is only as good as the evidence under it. This section documents how that evidence is checked — the method, the reasoning behind it, and the tools being built to keep it honest over time.
§ 01Why this section exists
A clean reference list looks identical whether every source in it was checked or none of them were. Nothing in a finished document reveals the difference. That is a problem for any reader trying to decide how much weight to give a claim — and it is a problem for the writer too, because a method held only in one's head drifts.
So the method is written down here, in public, in enough detail to be criticized. It is not an invention: it assembles established practice from intelligence analysis, evidence-based medicine, archival scholarship, and journalism into one sequence. The value, such as it is, lies in the arrangement and in the fact that it is disclosed.
Four passes
- Existence — is it real?
- Provenance — where did it originate?
- Corroboration — does anyone independent confirm it?
- Disconfirmation — what would prove it wrong?
Reliability tiers
§ 02In this section
Each piece is labeled with its actual status. Documents describing things that are built say so; documents describing things being built say that instead.
Method & Practice
The full write-up: what can go wrong in verification, the two principles behind the design, the four passes, how a source earns its T1–T4 tier, and what the method explicitly does not claim to do.
The Four Passes — Flowchart
A visual walk-through of a single source moving through each pass, what happens when one fails, and how both cleared and flagged sources end in the same verification appendix.
The Source Ledger
A two-table record of every source and every use of it, monitored on a schedule so retractions, dead links, and revised sources surface against every claim that depended on them. The design is documented in full; the workflow itself is being built.
Verification Appendices
The per-report records themselves — identifier, tier, what was verified, origin, and any flag — published alongside each report and indexed here once the ledger is in place.
§ 03Where it stands
The four passes are current working practice and are applied by hand to every report published on this site. The tiering and the appendix format are in use now.
The automation is not. The source ledger and its monitoring workflow are designed and under construction; nothing on this site should be read as claiming they are running yet. When they are, this page changes and the build gets documented.
An open weakness, stated rather than buried. The T1–T4 scale grades a source on one axis. Intelligence practice — the Admiralty Code — grades source reliability and information credibility separately, on the reasoning that a reliable source can still report something wrong. This method currently compensates by tiering per claim rather than per outlet. Whether to adopt a second axis is unresolved, and is the most likely change in the next revision.